In 2018, political scientist Eitan Hersh surveyed Americans about their political engagement. About a third said they spent two or more hours a day on politics. Of those, four-fifths weren’t actually doing anything. There is a difference between following politics and participating in it. Organizations can help people cross that gap (or leave them stranded).
Chick-fil-A and Zohran Mamdani’s campaign face a shared organizational problem: how do you develop people who can take responsibility for work you cannot supervise yourself? The differences between selling chicken and organizing volunteers matter. But so do the similarities: someone has to welcome newcomers, teach the work, delegate judgment, and keep the operation dependable as it grows.
Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York assembled some 50,000 volunteers during the primary. About 30,000 knocked on more than 1.6 million doors. By the final stretch of the general election, POLITICO put his volunteer network at 95,000. Whatever you think of his politics, an organization capable of putting that many people to work deserves a closer look.
Wall Street Journal writer Kendall White filled out an interest form on New York’s Young Democrats website, hoping to find a moderate alternative to the state’s socialist-leaning political organizations. Two weeks later, she’d heard nothing. There weren’t even any events listed on the website. She had supplied the interest. The organization failed to supply a next step.
Hotels have to earn strangers’ trust. Restaurant chains and factories have to train people and delegate judgment. Local governments have to make services reliable and understandable. Political organizations face versions of all these problems, with an additional constraint: volunteers can leave without losing a paycheck.
Organizations can tell employees what to do; volunteers have to be convinced. But there’s a lot of overlap as well, and campaigns can benefit from learning from other kinds of organizations.
I’ve argued before that readers who find groups like NYC-DSA and the Discord-based volunteer group Progressive Victory politically uncomfortable should still study how they operate. That includes YIMBYs, pronatalists, and others who want to build durable reform movements.
Addison Del Mastro raise a useful objection in “No Fun Please, We’re YIMBYs?“. Writing after a Washington YIMBY happy hour, he doubts that fun is the binding constraint at all. The supporters advocates most want, he suspects, are short on time and not necessarily looking for fun or for involvement.
All of these discussions center mostly around the social calendar. White concluded that DSA’s appeal was social rather than ideological, and at Del Mastro’s happy hour they’re wondering if they should get a band, or maybe get a wilder bar. Participatory experience is part of what an organization offers its constituents. But as important as it may be, I think improving a happy hour solves only a small part of the challenge of turning agreement into contribution.
how much organizational life must a supporter buy in order to contribute? My earlier essay was about how an organization builds the operations that make participation rewarding. Del Mastro asks whether the people who already agree want that much participation at all. He expects housing advocacy to struggle to attract the married, employed, comfortably housed thirty-somethings. The type that lend a movement credibility among the respectable crowd.
Different people have different expectations about their level of participation, as some supporters are looking for a social home while others prefer limited, more transactional interactions, helping occasionally but within bounds. Still others are looking to delegate to a competent organization, being happy to sign on as a dues-paying member or sign onto a letter. An organization structured entirely around community and social connection might keep those looking for that, but lose the rest.
The concepts and business examples below are thanks to Rory Sutherland, who founded Ogilvy’s behavioral science practice and is frankly a far better communicator about marketing basics than I am. His term “psycho-logic” describes the reasoning behind choices that can look irrational from the outside. People care about uncertainty, identity, obligation, and recognition as well as the stated purpose of an activity.
Why do people who agree with you stay home?
The Doorman Fallacy
First contact does more than it appears to. In Sutherland’s parable, consultants define a hotel doorman’s job as opening the door and replace him with an automatic one. They miss that he also hailed taxis, kept watch, discouraged trouble, recognized regulars and lent the hotel prestige. Sutherland named the mistake the doorman fallacy in his 2019 book Alchemy.
Political organizations are different because you can’t assign the same greeter every time, which is why welcoming has to be a routine and not a gift. NYC-DSA does this really well, showcasing the role as something you can be trained into.
At the new-member social White attended, existing members had been briefed to welcome newcomers. A state assembly candidate she had met once said goodbye using her name, though she wore no name tag. Small gestures like that tell a newcomer that someone has noticed them. An organization can teach people to make them.
Different people buy different benefits
Psychologists E. Gil Clary and Mark Snyder found that people participate in the same volunteer activities for very different reasons. Recruitment, volunteer satisfaction and continued participation depend on matching motivation with opportunity. Assuming your audience is interested in volunteering for your cause, and only your cause, is an oversimplification.
That changes how you judge an events calendar. A single event does not have to appeal to everyone. The calendar should give different people a way in.
NYC-DSA’s chapter-life page lists a no-audition choir, a soccer league, a run club, a monthly stand-up show, reading groups, a self-defense club and a game night, among dozens of social events a month. Nobody could attend all of it, and nobody needs to; the variety is the point. By the chapter coordinators’ own account, in an analysis of DSA membership records, socials and spectacle-style events were consistently its best weekly list-builders.
Variety cuts both ways. Del Mastro liked an alcohol-free happy hour that another regular left after ten minutes. As Sutherland puts it, the opposite of a good idea is often another good idea. This can create additional workload for an organization, and finding enough people happy to help can be challenging. On the other hand, deciding to organise only one kind of event, such as an evening, determines who can take part. Organising various kinds of events can help to engage people who would otherwise be missed.
Reduce uncertainty about the experience
Uncertainty is a cost of its own. Sutherland’s standard example is the Uber map. An engineer asks how to shorten the wait. The psychological question is how to make waiting less painful, and a little moving car lets you tell yourself a story about when your ride will arrive. Donald Moynihan, Pamela Herd and Hope Harvey call the civic version a learning cost: the effort of finding out what a process requires.
Political groups impose learning costs constantly. The first-timer Del Mastro met knew that housing costs too much and nothing about the intricacies of zoning. Every unexplained acronym is a small toll on people like her. NYC-DSA offers newcomers a structured education track, taught by trained facilitators from a clear curriculum.
A useful newcomer’s guide saves insiders’ time in the aggregate, though of course it takes time to write and maintain one. It’s not a substitute for interpersonal conversation, but it means newcomers can look up lots of answers to routine questions instead of pestering insiders to answer all of them.
Let people arrive as someone they already are
Joining a political group can feel like adopting a new identity. Psychologist Daphna Oyserman argues that people judge actions partly by whether they feel like something “people like me” do. Taking part can mean becoming slightly someone else.
Sutherland is more practical. A new behavior, he says, asks you to do something you haven’t done and that others around you don’t do, and then to explain yourself. Think of ordering cider in a beer-drinking crowd, or the men who order two-burger meals at a McDonald’s touchscreen but would never do it in front of a cashier.
One remedy is an easier entrance, built around something people already do. You can arrive as a singer: NYC-DSA’s choir is open to members and non-members alike, with no experience or audition required.
Another example was Progressive Victory‘s move to organize people who watch a certain streamer into political canvassers with a Discord. The identity they’re going through that door with is one they’re already familiar with. The social friction won’t completely disappear, but the barrier of entry is lower.
Similarly, REI has been closing its stores on Black Friday since 2015 in order to appeal to its own identity as being more about the outdoors.
Del Mastro’s big point is that people who want to advocate for completely normal things that everyone wants more of (like housing) have to “make yourself slightly abnormal” in order to make it happen. How do you end this dynamic?
Small commitments, recoverable relationships
If one “yes” implies an unlimited number of future requests, is it best to deny the first one? Sutherland argues that mobile phones reached full adoption only once pay-as-you-go gave commitment-phobes a way in. He admits he can’t bring himself to subscribe to the Financial Times, though he would happily pay a couple of pounds for an article. (Substack readers may find that both persuasive and slightly alarming.)
He also urges companies to offer a pause rather than force a choice between staying and cancelling, because “people who cancel never come back.” Netflix lets members pause a month at a time, up to three months, with some limits by plan and payment method.
Political groups can grade their asks the same way. Progressive Victory mixes an online community with nightly phone banks and, in 2024, seven swing-state canvass houses, so supporters can move up or down without leaving. The need is plain: an attendee told Del Mastro that he had a job and couldn’t do much of that anymore.
Pauses go best when they are planned, when the roles are designed to make the handoff easy, and someone is counting on remembering to invite people back.
Stepping back is like a relationship. Sometimes it’s easy to pick up where you left off if you’re only involved with the occasional event, and sometimes it’s harder if you’re a field lead and you’re leaving your territory in the middle of a campaign for someone else to pick up.
Fit around ordinary life
A dependable service can still be useless to someone who can’t reach it. 7-Eleven put availability in its name. The chain was renamed in 1946 for then-unusual hours of 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., and began going round the clock after an Austin store stayed open all night in 1963.
For instance, the government of the autonomous province of South Tyrol, in the Alpine north of Italy, pays qualified home-based carers to look after children as young as three months and as old as four in the carer’s home. Parents pay €0.90 to €3.65 an hour, depending on means, for nappies, meals, and child-minding; this is about a third of actual costs. Hours and conditions are agreed between the home-based carer and the parents.
Akashi brings help to the door. From about three months until a child’s first birthday, the city delivers roughly ¥3,000 worth of baby supplies every month. The supplies are handed over in person by women with child-rearing experience, who check on the family and answer questions.
Availability also decides who shapes public decisions. Del Mastro notes that NIMBYism succeeds partly because the people at 7 p.m. Wednesday hearings are often retired or otherwise have the time. David Schleicher and Nicholas Bagley argue that state rules on public participation favor groups with the organizational resources to use them. Who will be making that decision? Considerably influenced by the fact that you’ve chosen to make it during a weekday evening!
A willing volunteer still has to learn the job
Shorten time to useful competence
“Leaders learn best by doing,” says Chick-fil-A’s 24-36 month leadership development program. During their participation, people experience a variety of rotations. One has them acting as the interim manager of a Chick-fil-A company-operated restaurant; another has them assisting a new operator with opening a Chick-fil-A restaurant and developing a transition plan. A program lead mentors the participants throughout their development process.
Willingness must become skill, but that cannot be rushed. Albert Bandura found that belief in one’s abilities is most effectively increased through mastery, which means doing something with support and being successful. While we can’t shorten the amount of time it takes to become a practiced leader, fortunately, practice is transferable.
A campaign has months. The Nation describes NYC-DSA’s campaigns as a four-level ladder of canvassers, field leads who train newcomers and run each day, coordinators and staff. More than 400 people served as field leads in Mamdani’s primary. Grace Mausser, a chapter co-chair, put the philosophy simply: “We don’t gate-keep the skills you need to run a campaign.” Álvaro López, a co-chair of the chapter’s electoral working group, estimated that about 80 percent of the leads came from outside DSA by the end.
For organizational progression to make sense for volunteers on the lower rungs of an organization, newcomers have to be presented with valuable learning opportunities. Balihar Sanghera, looking at divisions of unpaid labor within voluntary groups, notes that handing over the reins is not always easy. Often times, a select few insiders hoard the most complex tasks within the organization, which prevents other participants from performing meaningful work, and, in turn, being acknowledged for it.
Agency
A role without authority isn’t much of a role. Richard Ryan and Edward Deci tie lasting motivation to autonomy, competence and relatedness, where autonomy means acting with a sense of volition. In each of these examples we can see that those closest to the work have knowledge that the center does not.
Toyota ensures that observations made in the workplace have a sure path to decisions. If an operator notices a problem, he has the ability and empowerment to stop the line by pulling a cord that illuminates an andon board which will summon help.
In The Spectator, Sutherland describes two British supermarket chains that needed new shopping carts. One built a demographic model. The other asked the staff who collect carts in the parking lots, and did much better.
In Groundbreakers, Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han show how Obama for America drew its capacity from unpaid local citizens who organized their own neighborhoods, some 2.2 million volunteers in all.
Thus, listening is critical to volunteers’ continued involvement. Consider what happens when a Toyota worker’s opinion is ignored. They’ll still get paid. But volunteers have even fewer incentives to continue volunteering if they don’t feel they’re being listened to since they can always stop volunteering.
What travels when an organization grows?
Repeatable standards with responsible local operators
Key to successful replication is support beyond just implementation; a system that works and people who can run it. The best practitioners of this are famously franchisers.
Chick-fil-A grand-opening supervisors plan the handover process with the goal of maintaining standards even after the team departs. Why use Chick-fil-A as an example? Chick-fil-A is an operator-centric company. While a McDonald’s franchisee needs to have at least $750,000 in personal, non-borrowed money to qualify, a Chick-fil-A candidate only has to provide $10,000 of his/her own money for the initial fee. However, franchisees need to be willing to operate their restaurant on a full-time basis. Chick-fil-A is known for its highly-competitive selection process for new franchisees.
The public-sector analogue is Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance, in which many centers of decision-making operate under shared rules. Sutherland, quoting the complexity writer Luca Dellanna, makes the case for local discretion in one line: “Centralisation is only efficient when viewed from the centre.”
Likewise, a movement needs to replicate chapters in much the same way that franchises replicate stores, however, a movement also needs to have ways of motivating chapter leaders in ways that are different from motivating franchisees because volunteer chapter leaders will not make money off of leading chapters and will not make a financial investment to lead chapters, as franchisees do with franchised stores. Therefore, a movement needs to find ways to motivate chapter leaders while providing them with training and support, similar to the way a franchisor trains and supports franchisees.
The softball league gives people a reason to get involved, creates relationships, recognition, a sense of duty etc.
It is very easy for anyone, including myself, to fail to realize that while you can copycat their softball league you cannot copycat the larger organizational structure that supports it, namely the ladder of advancement, a well defined training curriculum, rights of decision makers etc.
Hadas Thier writes an similar argument in The Nation that the electoral model of the DSA can’t be separated from its politics or replicated elsewhere; McKenna and Han trace the roots of Obama’s model back to decades of community organizing.
Who pays for the craft?
Building something people return to again and again, whether a socialist choir or a monthly YIMBY happy hour, is an achievement even before it produces evidence of political success. It also takes work, and the work is unevenly shared. In England and Wales, about 9 percent of adults account for about half of all volunteering hours, a group John Mohan and Sarah Bulloch call the civic core.
Not all costs are like-for-like when it comes to onboarding, so it’s helpful to break them into categories. For example, how much effort goes into avoidable organizational drag, such as explaining the same thing to the same people dozens of times, arguments about responsibilities, or fixing mistakes due to a botched handoff, which needlessly burdens the core? Some tasks will be ongoing, such as hosting a weekly social or responding to messages, some will be a one-off investment such as creating a guide for newcomers, and some will be occasional, such as training a new field lead.
In Joseph Juran’s diagram of quality management, more than a fifth of the work has to be redone because of failures. Waste will go on happening in an organization till somebody comes along to understand why. Successful organizations will invest a little in the first type of cost to save a lot from the third. Write things down and you’ll not have to keep on repeating them (as often). Define roles to avoid confusion. Teach to multiply the number of people who can be made responsible, much like Mamdani’s ladder.
The recurring load still has to be managed. An organization can reduce it by dropping events that don’t earn their keep, and it can spread it, which works only if newcomers get real tasks rather than leftovers.
Organizations can also fund it. Examples of this include NYC-DSA, which on their sign-up page tells them that they should consider a monthly donation to help them continue their work, and Progressive Victory which has 1,400 dues-paying members of their organization out of the 15,000+ members.
Examples of governments making investments include Akashi where they cut spending on public works in order to triple the number of employees in their child-care department, and in South Tyrol the provincial and municipal governments pay for two-thirds of the cost of home-based care.
Why would anyone come back?
People always come back to what works for them, fits their lives, creates value for them during use, and makes them feel recognized. Seems simple, but it isn’t.
Credible promises
In the classic account by Roger Mayer, James Davis and David Schoorman, trust rests on perceived ability, benevolence and integrity, and reliability feeds the first. Costco’s standing promise that it will refund membership fees any time a customer is unhappy. For a newcomer, the biggest consideration in joining an organization is the danger in trying; Costco’s ongoing satisfaction guarantee alleviates a lot of risk.
Public services raise the stakes, because the people who use them often have no alternative and plan their lives around them. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Akashi’s Izumi opened a children’s complex in front of the station before introducing free nursery for second children. His theory was that parents won’t trust a subsidy unless they can see the system around it. Keeping the promise also had a political price. Izumi paid for it by cutting public works rather than raising taxes, which, he acknowledged, offended some bureaucrats and businessmen.
A volunteer group’s floor is humbler, but the logic is the same. It starts with an interest form that someone answers.
Make returning worthwhile
Hahrie Han makes a key distinction between mobilizing, or activating the already motivated, and organizing, or building relationships and developing people. People are only in relationships, and thus organizations, if there is meaning in the relationship itself before the goals are achieved.
Sutherland’s commercial version is a pumpkin. On a Zoom call convened by Richard Thaler, a former student with a farmers’ market stall asked what to do with the day’s last unsold pumpkin. Sutherland suggested giving it to one of the stall’s best regulars as a present. The pumpkin is worth more as a gift than as a markdown.
My own metaphor for this is permaculture. Political surges are the rain, a standing calendar of softball, choir and book club is the earthworks that catch it, and members kept between surges are the water table.
A cultural explanation is also on offer: one of Del Mastro’s commenters wondered whether the movement is simply too square. I find that explanation too thin.
As Hersh points out, the mid-century amateur Democratic clubs featured late-night discussions of the issues of principle by vociferous and principled young professionals, but they couldn’t keep their volunteers around much more than a year or two, while captains of party precincts persisted for many.
Show people their contribution is noticed
Sutherland credits an unknown Ogilvy employee with suggesting that American Express print the year a customer joined on its cards. Acknowledging a relationship’s age, he argues, means a lot and carries no transactional component.
The Mamdani campaign gave volunteers a Zetro card styled on a MetroCard to track canvassing shifts. Those who canvassed enough times earned posters, T-shirts and other swag the campaign couldn’t sell.
Praise and recognition let people know that they’ve been noticed. Progress lets people know their work matters. That said, there are limit to this! Teresa Amabile’s diary research found that making progress on a meaningful project each day leads to more engagement than winning awards and praise!
Does membership produce anything beyond membership?
Make real progress visible, even if it’s small
Amabile, analyzing some 12,000 diary entries, found that small wins were most often associated with positive emotions and motivation.
Progress can happen at three different levels -- activity, capacity, outcome. Organizations can conflate the three.
Examples of activity include holding a meeting, staffing the position, building a crosswalk.
Capacity includes the work that’s done and then can continue without you -- leadership developed to act on their own.
Outcome includes real-world impact -- fewer drunk-driving accidents, a law being passed, houses being built.
Capacity and activity are valuable, and provide opportunities for fellowship, an important motivation for participating in an organization, but it’s critical to assess if it’s leading to outcomes.
Holding a well-attended meeting is activity. Being able to hold well-attended meetings is capacity. The goal, however, may be a particular outcome in the world. Capacity and activity may not lead to that.
Carmel reaches the third level. Jin Wang and Jessica Cicchino of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found injury crashes 47 percent lower than expected after the city’s intersection conversions. It is good to see that an increase in total crashes in multi-lane roundabouts, though not significantly, is being reported. That is honest feedback, especially since the greatest improvements were reported: injury crashes were found to decrease by as much as 84% in double-teardrop roundabouts.
Did Mamdani’s field operation win him the race? Its size alone cannot establish that. As I’ve discussed before, turning out voters and changing their minds are different tasks. The New Haven experiment found that face-to-face canvassing increased turnout. That does not tell us how many voters a campaign persuaded to support its candidate.
Changing minds is harder. Joshua Kalla and David Broockman’s study drawing on 49 field experiments estimated an average persuasive effect of approximately zero for campaign contact in general elections. None of this necessarily settles Mamdani’s race. Persuasion effects were concentrated in contexts where a deeply unpopular candidate position was coupled with heavy targeting. Persuasion effects were concentrated where outcomes were measured immediately after contact, which is a context where they do fade over time.
Organizational capacity is a separate question. The Nation’s account traces NYC-DSA’s field model through successive campaigns beginning in 2017. Further research would help to reveal if DSA’s leadership onboarding will be sustainable across multiple campaigns and how recruiting from outside may affect electoral results. One organizer estimates that around 80 percent of leads were new to DSA, which does indicate an ability to incorporate newcomers into positions of responsibility
Craft is not strategy
Successful operations can recruit the right people, train them, and retain them, but they may be doing this perfectly well for a bad strategy. Choosing the fight requires three decisions that go beyond operations. The first is knowing what goal is worth pursuing. The second is who can grant it: Hersh’s reminder is that political volunteering is about acquiring power, and power sits with particular people in particular places. Third, while knocking on doors might be effective for increasing turnout, Kalla and Broockman’s results are a helpful reminder that canvassing appears to have limited effectiveness in persuading people during the context of a general election.
Which means that, faced with the prospect of packing a retiree-friendly Wednesday-night hearing or lobbying the state legislature, a YIMBY group has a whole host of options. Deciding where to take that fight is a strategic decision before it’s a logistical one. As Schleicher and Bagley write, state and local governments do much of the heavy lifting of the American state, and, for the most part, out of the eyes of most voters.
Can political organizations teach the craft?
It is true that political movements have been much more willing to learn lessons from businesses than vice versa. But that ship can be steered in the opposite direction, and it seems to me that NYC-DSA has found answers to questions about organizing reform movements that YIMBYs, industrial policy advocates, pronatalists, and the broader state capacity movement have not. It has done so at a moment when, as Theda Skocpol has painstakingly chronicled, mass-membership federations that trained ordinary people in the arts of civic work have given way to professionally managed advocacy groups that purport to act on their members’ behalf without their full and hearty participation.
Finding and developing people matters well beyond any one campaign. In 2024, 70 percent of the 76,902 elections Ballotpedia covered were uncontested, the highest rate since it began counting in 2018. It is not possible to conclude that empty ballots are the result of insufficient attention to training. People may decide against running for a host of reasons. But empty ballots are one reason to pay attention to the question of who develops potential candidates.
Campaigns provide opportunities to develop organizers. Michael Carter went from a Sanders-inspired grassroots group in Brooklyn to deputy campaign manager for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Tascha Van Auken, NYC-DSA’s field specialist, became Mamdani’s field director. Mamdani himself had been a paid canvass manager on the 2017 council race where the chapter first developed its field model. These are examples of political organizations giving people experience they later used in more demanding political roles.
The claim that campaigns are excellent schools for organizers has plenty of evidence to support it. The claim that organizers who learned their skills during campaigns make excellent operators of public agencies or businesses remains an interesting hypothesis.
Campaigns are places that reward acting quickly and persuading people, and have a definite deadline. Administration, in the public or private sector, rewards acting within procedures and patience, and has no end. Whether a good field lead makes a good poll worker or small-business owner or school-board member is unstudied.
But it provides a plausible rationale for studying political organizations as interesting and valuable institutions, no matter what politics they espouse.
Where should an organization start?
One time Will Guidara brought his team from Eleven Madison Park to the best restaurant in the world at the time and asked them what was okie-dokie about it. The coffee wasn’t great. Service for people who drink beer wasn’t great. So, he hired a coffee sommelier and a beer sommelier. Sutherland calls this reverse benchmarking -- figuring out what competitors aren’t paying attention to and doing it really well.
Organizers (speaking from my own experience when I organized meetups) are also blind to the solutions to problems. Some solutions are easy, such as answering sign-up sheets that went unanswered or defining insider lingo, others are hard, such as training for leadership or creating a place for drop-in volunteers.
Try the exercise with other groups. What are the strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps one group is really good at being welcoming but doesn’t create opportunities for responsibility. Another excels at leadership development but can be inflexible for drop-in participation. Another loves throwing parties, but has a dearth of accomplishments. Each group type would leave spaces for rivals to fill.